October 20 – February 4, 2022 

Selections from the permanent collection co-curated with Todd Giles, PhD, Associate Professor of English 

From Boom to Bust brings together in conversation a diverse array of American artists, authors, and cinematographers from the boom of post-World War I through the bust of the Great Depression. Artists represented include Modernists such as Joseph Pennell and John Marin, Regionalists Thomas Hart Benton and Blanche McVeigh, and Social Realists John Sloan and Martin Lewis. Modernists experimented with form; Social Realists critiqued class inequities in the over-crowded cities; and Regionalists looked back nostalgically to our rural agrarian beginnings. Some were friends; others foes. Some avant-garde; others traditionalists. In common, Americans were passionately representing the nation as they saw it firsthand.